Scientists have discovered the world's oldest color. It's bright pink

Head of ANU's Biogeochemistry Laboratory Janet Hope holds a vial containing the world's oldest intact pigments

The color of bubble gum, flamingos and cotton candy – bright pink – is the oldest color in the world. Researchers have discovered ancient pink pigments in 1.1 billion-year-old rocks at the bottom of the Sahara Desert in the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania, West Africa, making them the colors the oldest in the geological register

. , who discovered the pigments as part of her doctoral studies at the National University of Australia, the bright pink colors are more than 500 million years older than the oldest known pigments and were produced by ancient oceanic organisms

the molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were produced by ancient photosynthetic organisms inhabiting an ancient ocean that has long since disappeared, "said Dr. Gueneli in A press release

Indeed, the researchers milled pigments several billion years in powder, and extracted and analyzed the molecules of ancient organisms

. they are diluted, the old pigments appear in bright pink.But when they are concentrated, the fossils can go from a blood red to a deep purple, she says.

Implications for ancient life

The older color su Earth was not the only discovery to come out of the sea. The team of researchers from Australia, Japan and the United States could also use the pigments to confirm that the ancient marine ecosystems were dominated by tiny cyanobacteria, a type of bacterium that gets energy through photosynthesis. The discovery, published in a new study, tells us more about the evolution of ancient animals.

"Accurate analysis of ancient pigments confirmed that tiny cyanobacteria dominated the base of the food chain in the oceans a billion years ago," Dr. Gueneli explains in the press release [19659003] According to the principal investigator, Dr. Jochen Brocks, associate professor at UNA, the limited supply of large food particles like algae. "The algae, although they are still microscopic, are A thousand times larger than cyanobacteria and a much richer food source, "Dr. Brocks says in his release

The cyanobacterial oceans began to disappear about 650 million years ago, said Brock, when the algae began to spread rapidly.This seaweed provided "the explosion of energy necessary for the evolution of complex ecosystems, where large animals, including humans, could flourish on Earth, "he said.